Bluetooth range boosted to 50m
Posted: 08/12/2000 at 13:02 GMT
The Bluetooth developers forum in San Jose has shown
itself to be a breeding ground of ideas for things to do with the
technology.
TDK reckons it has found a way to boost the range of a Bluetooth
signal
to 50 meters, giving it a radius closer to that of the 802.11 wireless LAN
standard*, but requiring much less power.
The company says that it
has
been able to send signals further because of its ceramic antenna
technology. TDK
has begun demonstrating its new technology, which has been designed as a
USB
device and will be initially targeted at PCs.
Meanwhile, IBM has
also
been demonstrating new products at the San Jose forum, although it admits
that
not all the prototypes will make it into production. John Karidis, an
engineer
in IBM's personal systems group, said developers should "experiment with as
many
ideas as you have time for".
On show was a touchscreen watch called
WristPad. This featured organiser and messaging functions, and could be
easily
read because of its high resolution - 720dpi - display. Because this would
make
even six-point font legible, according to IBM, the screen could hold as
much
text as a Palm handheld. And obviously, being Bluetooth enabled, the watch
can
talk to your PC, etcetera, etcetera.
The motherboard for the watch,
which has 8MB of DRAM, is 1.25 inches across, runs an embedded version of
Linux
and was developed at IBM in Japan. Karidis reckons the watch could be
commercialised within two years.
Based on the same motherboard, the
Cyberphone2 was probably the strangest idea IBM put forward. It has a
flip-out
mirror that it can project text on to, nattily getting round the small
screen
problem making full web pages visible to the user. It has a trackpad on the
back
of the phone to control navigation.
Other ideas included a pen that
automatically transcribed everything written into text on a computer,
laptops
with adjustable keyboards or screens and a wearable hard drive. ®
*802.11 works on the same frequency as Bluetooth, has a range of
about
300ft but requires much more power. The two standards are not compatible,
since
they operate on the same frequency they interfere with each other.